148: Don’t try this at home

There seems to be a 5-lb. variation band throughout the day. Yesterday morning it was 151; after dinner it went up to 153. Sometimes it seems like a marching band. But even if it was just for the hour and a half before dinner, I finally hit the 140’s.

That’s really fucked up

I’m 6’1″. This gave me a BMI of 19.5, squarely in the last column on the chart before you drop off from “skinny as shit” and onto “UN Famine Relief Program.”

Why do it?

The subtitle above should suggest part of the reason. People who obsess over their weight until it drops into this category are all fucked up, except for me, of course. I’m normal.

What began as a simple desire to shave off a swelling midriff degenerated into a mind-over-matter diet that has shorn about twenty pounds from my frame. I can’t tell you if it’s been worth it, but I can tell you what it’s like.

Switching to survival

If I wanted to weigh less, I would eat less. Pretty simple, right?

It’s not that simple. The minute I told myself that it was time to cut back, my entire body revolted…on a cellular level. I went from living an ordinary life where each day was an ebb and flow of eating whatever I wanted, to a bizarre life where the only thing I could think about was food.

Your body is programmed to survive, and even thinking about denying it sustenance triggers overwhelming hunger. The bad news? It never, ever went away. The worse news? The hunger got worse the more I lost. That’s all as it should be; the word “diet” spells “die” with the first three letters for a reason.

This whole process took less than six weeks. It has been an ordeal beyond any description, which is why it’s so awesome. Normally to create this type of epic adventure it takes rain, cold, wind, bad roads, and 120+ miles with lots of climbing. The key components of this home-based radical, unhealthy, bizarre, and masochistic weight loss were as follows: Hunger suppression, mental distraction, and portion reduction.

Hunger suppression

No mind is strong enough to override the body’s command to eat. Hunger is the strongest sensation there is. If we were to compare its power with the other huge human drive, hunger is to sex what truth is to FOX News. So I had to suppress the hunger. The best way to do this would have been chain smoking cigarettes along with some mixture of meth, crack, amphetamines, or narcotics. Since none of these seemed compatible with the Donut Ride or NPR (for long, anyway), I went with the weakest, yet cheapest and most easily obtained suppressant: Caffeine.

Continual caffeine in the form of coffee or tea was a must. There was no other way to suppress the screaming, raging, overwhelming, mind-altering hunger that shrieked at me without rest from the instant I chose to diet, even before I’d turned away the first jelly-filled donut.

I now know that any diet promising to alleviate hunger, unless it includes a serious chemical hunger suppressant, is a lie. I went from three small cups of coffee a day to seven or eight large cups of the blackest, nastiest, bitterest brew I could make, with strong green tea in between.

Mental distraction

Caffeine was not enough, though. Even though the sharpest, most awful edge of the hunger razor was slightly blunted by copious quantities of coffee and tea, hunger was far too powerful to be put off with a few cups of hot water strained through burnt beans.

Since in my daily life there was food everywhere, the only way I could keep from caving to biology was to busy myself with a physical activity that would take my mind off the awful hunger. This was a radically different concept from using exercise to lose weight. Rather, was the recognition that unless my hands were employed in some physical activity, they were going to grab the edges of the nearest cheeseburger and shove it down my throat.

Cycling helped to a degree, but there was a limit to how much I could ride my bike, particularly when the lack of food had me moving around on my hands and knees. This was where the gym helped. I got tiny workout benefits, and toned up some of the looser parts of my anatomy, but for the most part the gym was a place where I could do something besides eat and besides thinking about eating.

I began going to the gym almost every day, even after pedaling home from work, as the hour or so between arrival and dinner was a deadly time period for massive eating. By staying occupied at the gym, even if it meant doing curls with 5-lb. pink dumbbells, I was distracted from food. Without this type of distraction, hunger would have won out and forced me to be healthy and normal. Only by artificially distracting myself was I able to stay committed to this path of physical and mental collapse.

Portion reduction

If I thought that hunger suppression was hard, and if I thought that dragging butt off to the gym when I was so hungry I could barely stand was hard, the truly hard part was harder still: Portion reduction. You’ll notice I’ve not included exercise anywhere in this regimen, even though I happen to cycle. It’s because I didn’t think I could really grind myself into a stick-like wraith of skin and veins with exercise. The key, and by far the most challenging and miserable and awful and dreadful and essentially impossible part of this process, was portion reduction.

Portion reduction was the hardest part for several reasons. First, most people don’t control what gets doled out on their plate because they either eat out, or someone prepares their food for them, or they eat prepared meals that already have the portion parceled out.

Second, even if you do control what goes on your plate, you’re almost certainly surrounded by other people who are hell-bent on relishing the only happy thing left in life after age 40, i.e. eating. These normal people (or enablers) will pile their plate high while you’ve allotted just the right amount, and before long you’ll be eating off their plate, or they’ll be sharing. Happens every time.

Third, you probably drink. Booze is caloric, but more importantly, it forces you to let down your diet guard. Boom! The buzz hits and you’re inhaling like a vacuum cleaner.

You can forget exercising off the fat

It won’t work. There aren’t enough hours in the day to burn off a bagful of burgers. I’ve ridden less and exercised less throughout this entire nasty ordeal and it’s worked. Just think about the times that you go out and do a century, then top it off with a huge lunch and beer. Fact is, you didn’t burn that much in six hours, and a casual glance at any pack of century riders will confirm that whatever they’re doing, “riding it off” isn’t it.

A manorexic retrospective

So, has it all been worth it? Nope. No way. Life has become a jaw-grinding time trial until the next meal.

Observations:

I’ve become picky about what I eat. Very little junk except for coffee. Haagen-Dasz isn’t junk food, right?

My recovery on the bike has vastly improved.

I climb better. Today on VdM I chased down some dude in his 60’s with hairy legs, panniers, and a triple, then dropped him.

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§ 36 Responses to 148: Don’t try this at home

Well I hear you but Wiggens is buggiing me. How did you walk away from beer? I did for almost ten years but the continuing saga is the same. AA is bullshit, even worse than a wankfest. Where is happiness?

I can explain to you why BMI=B.S. and so are the numbers on the scale. And, how you should approach the idea of your “ideal weight” but I’ve had too many beers tonight to be an advice sausage spitting out a rational sentence. So, now that you are in the 140’s I only have 2 things to say to you: 1. Fuck you, you skinny wanker! (that’s the scream of jealousy) 2. Eat a hamburger.

I went from 170 to 128 at 5′ 10″ a few years ago and finally settled at 138.Same kind of DIEt I find I need more food on a ride than everyone else to avoid bonking. So I wind up carrying the weight in my pocket.

Seth, Dude. We should go back to bong hits, piping hot chocolate chip cookies slammed with a gallon of ice cold homo D milk, Bob’s bread, TFB with PB&J, strawberry margs, Harold’s brisket, and hoping for somebody to beat the shit out of the Cowboys. Sure you’ll be fatter (I’ll be about the same), but we’ll both be happier.

Ha! I know what you mean! At almost 250lbs (oh, and a pack a day smoking habit) this article perfectly describes my truth over the last year since I began cycling. A constant reality of hunger and exhaustion sprinkled with the feeling of a rolling black-outs every time I stand up too quickly. Every waking moment contemplating my next meal, every morning scoring myself on my eating habits the day before and deciding wether I earned breakfast based on the number reflected back to me. Avoiding friends and family after 5 because they don’t understand why I’d rather not go to the fucking Home Town Buffet, who goes there anyway? I need new friends. But it’s true, your body quickly adapts to malnutrition. The journey continues for me, at 165 I’m still as unsatisfied as my appetite. I’m actually on the scale right now, fuck, this keyboard is weighing me down!

I’m sitting here shoving peanut M&M’s into my maw and washing them down with a twelve pack of Yeungling Black and Tans on the theory that it is easier to lose weight in a coma than going through all that strenuous dieting.

There is a way to lose fat while cycling. It is as Dog awful as your diet, but it works. It’s called bonk training. It involves riding first thing in the morning. You’re allowed caffeine (four shots of espresso is my poison of choice) before you hit the road, but no food; that means no sugar or milk in you coffee. No calories allowed before you ride. When you do hit the road, your pockets are empty of sustenance and your bottles contain only water. Now go ride. An hour of flats at first, then add pace, hills and more time. Do not ride too hard. By blowing through most, but not all, of your glycogen stores, you will force your body to start metabolizing your fat stores as fuel. But that metabolic process requires some glycogen (thus don’t go out too fast). Go out too hard and you completely bonk and end up lying by the side of the road. Go out too slow and you don’t burn through enough glycogen to force the body to start burning fat. If you’re doing it right, you will feel like shit and you will be as slow as molasses.

When you get home hit the protein and some fats, no carbs. Or better yet, more caffeine and no eating at all for several hours after you ride.

Yes. How’d you guess? She’s 45 (three and a half years younger than I am), Japanese, and hales from Tochigi Prefecture. I’m totally smitten with this woman; can’t get her out of my head. She’s everything I’ve ever dreamed about. She has three kids, who are all wonderful and who I frankly love just as much as I love her, maybe even more. They are amazing kids, which makes sense because she’s such an amazing woman.

I’m not a very good driver, though, and sports cars kind of scare me. What about a red Camry with one of those little sporty spoiler thingies on the back?

148: Trying it at home
Because these last 20 pounds have decided to stick to me like my vaccuum at 13, I have decided to delve deeper into my own manorexia and attempt your caffeine induced suicide. But there appear to be some undisclosed secondary effects to consuming copious amounts of caffeine on an empty stomach. First of which being that “cracked-out feeling I have come to lovingly refer to as the “Whitney effect”. Although admittedly I kind’a like it, I can’t seem to complete a single task without unwillingly creating a new one! Secondly and perhaps most importantly is “tha’ shhhhhiiiitttzzz-zz-z”-z. Without getting too graphic, the coffee seems to run through me like Usain Bolt in the 100m.

Mmmmmm….cheeseburger…oh shit, wait, did the “avoid taking anything herein with even the slightest trace of seriousness” include the cheeseburger advice? Shit, dog-dammit WM, you speak on so many levels!